A State Education

'You're always the teacher,' Jamie whined, 'I want to be the teacher!'

Sam jutted her bottom lip and glared at him with a will in her eyes that could level a small city.

'Well you can't,' Sam had a finality about her voice and such steadfast stubbornness- even at eight- that no one dared argue with her, except for Jamie, who's did so more from foolishness than courage.

'But this is the last time we'll get to play Academy. Cant I just-'

'No. Besides, we won't need to play Academy when we're there for real.'

She looked at Jamie's quivering lip and sighed in a perfect imitation of her mother. Sitting down next to her friend, she wrapped one bony arm around his shoulders, her other hand playing absently with a red flower in the grass.

'Don't be sad,' she handed him the flower as an appeasement offering, 'We're the lucky ten percent, remember?'

Their mothers watched the scene with a mixture of affection and melancholy curdling in their bellies, the warmth of their children's contentment doing little to thaw the cold grip of foreboding that had tightened around their guts.

Jamie clasped his hands together in an attempt to stop them shaking; the forbidden grass felt like needles and every whisper of wind sounded like a command for his execution.

After a tense wait of what felt like hours, Sam arrived with glistening red eyes and timorously sat down with him. Without a word, without even looking at each other, they threaded their trembling fingers together: their own tiny revolution in the palms of their hands. They sat in petrified silence for a small lifetime before Sam finally whispered, barely audibly:

'Do you remember when we were little and we were so excited to come here?'

The memory wrenched at Jamie's heart,

'They told us we were lucky.'

'I don't think I believe in luck anymore.'

Jamie wrapped his arm around Sam's shoulders, their hands still clasped together.

'Don't say that,' he whispered, 'that's how they beat you.'

His eyes drifted over the grass below them, stopping on a small flash of red in the shaded green. His stretched his free hand out and plucked it from the ground- a tiny, delicate red flower that somehow reminded him of a time before, a time when things were good. He turned to Sam with the tiny beacon if hope between his fingers.

'For luck,' he whispered, threading its stem into the cheap material of her collar, underneath so it wouldn't be seen.

Sam wiped the tears from her eyes with a hand the trembled less now, and looked around until she found and identical flower in the grass behind her. She repeated her friend's actions on his own collar, and half-laughed:

'The colour of revolution.'

'Your collar's squiffy,'

Sam rose onto her tiptoes- Jamie had grown significantly taller than her in recent months- and flipped his collar up, surprised to see a small red flower standing out of the black.

'You kept it?' she teased, 'It's been two years how has it not fallen apart?'

Jamie gave the awkward lopsided smile (that always made Sam blush in an embarrassingly un characteristic way),

'Sheer force of will... And a little tape-'

His eyes flicked to something over Sam's shoulder and his grin fell away suddenly. Sam froze as the familiar pool of icy terror formed in the pit of her stomach.

The prefect drifted unnaturally towards them, its movements more like a lead caught by the wind than a human being. Its black, hollow eyes were deadened by the cruelties that had earned it its title and it clutched its rifle like a child would a stuffed animal. Sam pitied it. It said nothing, but raked its eyes over the pair who stood, shaking, but automatically arranged into a military stance. Like a gunshot, it jerked both arms up and grasped Jamie by the collar, crushing the flower between its gloved hand and yanking his collar back down into place. Sam let out a shakes breath as the prefect walked away. They were lucky it hadn't seen the flower as a symbol of revolution.

In a way, it was.

As Sam sat, systematically blanking out everything her lecturer said, her eyes couldn't help flickering back, and back, to that one empty seat.

/'I won't sit and do nothing anymore.'

'They'll kill us if we try anything, you know that Sam!'

'Beats living like this.'/

The lecturer's eyes passed deliberately over the void desk, never stopping there for more than a second, but in those brief moments Sam swore she could detect a slight piling of her cheeks.

/'Do you even want things to change?'

'Of course I do. I just don't want you to get hurt.'

'Don't want yourself to get hurt you mean.'

'I would die for this! I would die for you!'/

/They've killed him. They've killed him and it's my fault./

Sam barely noticed when class was dissmissed and she stumbled unconsciously out of the room.

/He wanted to prove himself to me. It's my fault, it's my fault./

Her stomach rolled threateningly, her throat clenched, her breath came in short, sharp gasps.

/They've killed him, they've killed him, he's dead, he's-/

All thoughts in Sam's mind melted away- everything stilled as her eyes fixed on the back of a familiar head...

/He's alive./

Sam strode carefully over to her friend- forcing her legs not to break into a run- and reached out to touch his arm. The contact sent a flicker of electricity through her fingertips and she couldn't keep the grin off her face, but as he turned and fixed her with a still, empty gaze her heart plummeted. His eyes were as dead and void of soul as if he were buried in the ground; what blood they'd spared him still pumped through his veins but this in no way constituted a life. This figure's skin- disconcertingly free of bruises and cuts- was like an ill fitting costume. The thing standing before Sam was not Jamie, not even a person, but a walking corpse:

/They've killed him. They've killed him and it's my fault./